the day before we let out for spring break it was raining hard and when i took the first garbage can out, it had blown over with its top in a huge puddle, before i even got the second one out. this process soaked me entirely but meant i spent the day with that fresh-rain feeling all over me. it's break now, time to relax and watch the pinks, reds, yellows, and whites all blossom and work with each other.

i tried to make a batch of cookies for one of the kids but used salt instead of sugar; i ate only one bite of the cookie i'd made and threw up the cookie and part of my dinner. i think there's just a lot of pressure associated with the end of term, a time when some students are very disappointed by what happened, and others come dancing through the halls overjoyed to be out of the program or at least out of their particular level. home now, i'm trying to read my wife's book on stalking because we've been asked to write a screenplay based on it. the problem is that her academic voice putting all these romantic jerks in perspective is somewhat hard on me. it's as if she'd look at every romantic batch of flowers with a jaundiced eye and i'm sure actually that she's not the only one who would. i just don't want to be reminded of it, necessarily.

so i go back to my poetry a little, and on this front i have something to report. when i did my reading, and actually read my newly-published (oct. 2011) book, i discovered typos and two repeated poems, to my horror. i was somewhat embarrassed about selling it though truth be told all the money went to the homeless shelter anyway, so it was not really a problem. from october to the reading i'd written a hundred more poems (or so) and was eager to put them in as it really filled out the situation especially in some states that were very weakly underrepresented. mind you i still don't have puerto rico, guam, or more than two from d.c., but i now have a minimum of eight in every one of the fifty and over six hundred altogether. so, rather than just fix what i'd made, which was already an incredible hassle, i put together e pluribus haiku 2012 and printed it, quickly. i now have ten copies in my hand. it's bigger, bigger print, but, and this is really sneaky, some of the poems (540 or so are about the same) have been slightly altered. assuming there will be more, one could now collect them all and study their evolution over time. i have assumed from the beginning that there would be many. i am also working on an entirely local one, boxcars on walnut, which has actually been there for a while (i considered calling it thirteen and fifty one, five seven five...and which has its own website which has been used for pop art and other kinds of artistic expression in the past.

break-time goals: get going on this screen play, whether the characters in a stalking drama are odious or what; do a little boxcars poetry or whatever else crosses my mind; fix the dulcimer (a key fell apart and the super-glue i bought to fix it may have got lost in the shuffle); catch up on new yorkers, at least a little; get the garden ready (i'm big on onions these days...); go from 214 to 209 pounds by virtue of rigorous exercise (whenever my wife catches wind of pointless dreaming she says save it for the blog as if all dreams are just that, endless and pointless prattle about things i coudln't possibly finish....like clean the garage, fix that d-n back shower, or clean out my back office....); maybe do some writing on just passing through...remember that this all appears here, on this blog, and will appear in italics in order to set it apart from all this other prattle. it's real though, it's all true, and i'd like to think that someday somebody will come poking around, and say, hey, this is where it all started. 'cause that's true.